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I thought Francis was tremendous for the first 5 innings but he ran out of gas in the 6th.

Based on how many players had increased swing speeds in the early going I was sort of wondering if there was some sort of calibration issue. I recall that Springer was several MPH higher before the results were updated this morning, somewhere around 73.5 MPH or so. He's increased his fast swing rate by 10% which is encouraging and the overall quality of contact has been solid as well. I also recall Roden was sitting about around 73 MPH before the results were posted. With Roden I'm thinking he hasn't been getting his best swings off recently with quite a few awkward swings/jam shots etc.

I've been tracking this as well. I've noticed that the average speeds in particular are swinging pretty dramatically at this point, it just seems like there aren't nearly enough data points to make any broad conclusions at this point.

Fingers crossed some of the spring training success carries over to the regular season.

I simply don’t think the situation is nearly as dire as you have been portraying for the last 2-3 seasons. The AL in general is wide open this season and I fully believe the Blue Jays have a very realistic shot to compete for the playoffs. I don’t think that trading either of Vlad or Bo this offseason would have brought back assets that outweigh what these players would offer to the Blue Jays in their final years of control due to the injury riddled season that Bo just endured and the fact that Vlad loses a lot of excess value due to the inflated salary he’s on track to earn.

Barring multiple breakouts and/or resurgences this team almost certainly won’t be a World Series contender. I’d still rather see competitive teams attempt to have playoff success vs a constant cycle of rebuilding attempting to build a perfect team. Nearly every team in the sport aside from the Dodgers has a ton of holes and it’s not like they have been some sort of playoff dynasty either as regular season success means little once the playoffs start.

I'd wager it has something to do with 14-15 years of Vlad.

It seems very apparent that the team preferred to sign Vlad long term but was waiting for him to prove that he wasn’t a single year flash in the pan and could recreate the 2021 success. Vlad finally proved he could be an elite offensive performer for a second season and showed that he’s worth offering an extension to, He sure as hell hadn’t shown that to be the case after 2022 and 2023 as he had only produced a single season commensurate with his talent level and was looking for a mega contract that he hadn’t come close to earning.

According to you the Dodgers are the only World Series contender so everyone else should just pack it in. An entire league that’s rebuilding sure would be a barrel of monkeys.

Juan Soto has literally been twice as valuable as Vlad, and all the Padres could get back for him was a few years of a number 2 starter and some spare parts. What would Vlad even bring back after the mediocre back to back seasons of 2022/2023? The people offering up this type of criticism are ignoring how damn inconsistent the guy has been and acting like 2021 and 2024 are the rule rather than the exception.

I think the reported $450 million present day value the team offered to Vlad easily represents superstar value.

This dude would seemingly rather commit seppuku instead of simply admitting he was wrong. 😆

People thought you were crazy for being so insistent that it was going to require $20 million a season to extend Kirk. Raleigh is a full class above Kirk at this point of their respective careers. Raleigh has 3 consecutive seasons of 4+ wins and just produced a 5 win season. I think it's not impossible for Kirk to eventually reach those types of heights if the bat comes back, but that's far from a given.

I fully expect the AL East to be a dogfight this season. The Yankees injury issues have really evened out the field to a great degree.

A factor that has me excited about Roden is that he appeared to have flipped a switch later in the season in AAA and fully carried over that level of performance into spring training. He appeared to require a period of adjustment as he really struggled to start the level with a 49 wRC+ over his first 23 games. His last 48 games saw him mash to the tune of a 181 wRC+, and that's impressive no matter the age of the player, particularly a guy who was essentially a second year pro at that point of his career. If he were to start the year in AAA and continue producing like that I expect that Roden would start rocketing up prospect rankings accordingly.

I'm not going to hold Roden's age or draft status against him all that much, as he was a college draftee and has only been a professional for a shade over 2 seasons up to this point. I can't help but feel that Roden is being underrated to a degree by the scouting community at large, as they seemed to have completely missed the massive leap forward that he made at the AAA level and carried that over completely into spring training. Having said that I'm aware of the danger of stat scouting, so we shall see how he responds to proper MLB level pitching and defenses in the near future. I can agree that Spencer Horwitz is a good comparison for Roden at the plate, but I expect that Roden will likely offer up a lot more value defensively and on the bases as he's a far better athlete. I see that MLB Pipeline recently upgraded Roden to a 50FV over the previous 45FV they had assigned to him. Keith Law was fairly complementary in his own ratings, He had the same concerns about a potential platoon role, but Roden was actually very solid against LHP in his time in Buffalo with a .317/.353/.524 line.

Come on man, letting a mediocre longman type go at the end of spring training is hardly going to provide ammunition for firing a front office.

Are you suggesting that Roden has a likely ceiling of a league average outfielder, or simply stating that even if this ends up being his ceiling that he's still a useful piece? The various projection systems essentially see him producing at a rate similar to a league average outfielder in his rookie season, surely there would be a solid possibility for improvement to become more than that in the future.

What makes you think that I "worry" about your opinions? I like to debate on message boards, and you are a particularly easy target to pick apart based on your lack of basic baseball acumen and proclivity for making statements that aren't rooted in reality or based in any sort of fact. I've found that the default response of those unable to understand basic statistics is to claim that statistics are "cherrypicked" whenever someone presents any sort of statistics that support their argument. You need to spend some time brushing up on your basic reading comprehension if you want to have any sort of chance of contributing anything to the discussion on this board aside from offering yourself up as a punching bag for other posters to utilize. It seems you are getting yourself confused. You said that I suggested that Kirk is 98% of the player that Vlad is, but I simply showed that he has provided 98% of the overall value to the Blue Jays since he became a full time regular. I fully admit to providing statistics that showed that Kirk has been nearly as valuable as Vlad, try to keep your facts straight. Having said that Vlad has a much higher overall ceiling than Kirk up to this point, peaking at 6.3 FWAR vs 4.4 FWAR for Kirk. Players get paid a lot more for offensive contributions than they do for their defensive contributions, and Vlad has a much higher offensive ceiling so it stands to reason that his eventual contract is going to be several magnitudes higher as a result.

Ultimately I think it made more sense for Jansen to move on to a new team that had a starter opening to provide. I was always hoping/waiting for Danny to put together a full healthy season where he was productive with the bat to prove he was capable of this. He was able to largely remain healthy last season, but unfortunately he produced the worst MLB season of his career so it was time to fully hand the reins to Kirk and move on from Jansen.

I think this basically boils down to "Shatkins bad" as a default response.

It's not particularly surprising that you are having a really hard time fitting in on a forum where the typical member utilizes logic back up by statistics in order to formulate their opinions. I get that actually using your brain to think when forming opinions is beyond your capabilities but try your best to keep up. I never suggested that Kirk is 94% of the player that Vlad is, those are your words and not mine. However Kirk has provided 94% of the overall FWAR that Vlad has in the last 3 seasons, and just signed a deal for approximately 1/3 of the term that will likely be required to sign Vlad long term at approximately 12% of the total financial outlay. That's a fantastic extension deal whether you have the mental acumen to understand that or not.

I don't know why you keep referencing the BABIP value for the month as if it's useful on it's own. It's nothing more than a surface level statistic. Vlad still ran an overall ground ball rate of 53.2% for the month of June as well, so it's not as if he can't be a very productive hitter despite the ground ball tendencies. Vlad outproduced his expected batting average for the month by a handful of points, but conversely underperformed his expected slugging for the month by a sizable degree. I believe some of this was the fact that he was hitting line drives so hard the ball was bouncing back to the fielders so quickly that it mitigated the chance for a lot of doubles. I was very hopeful as the calendar turned to June that all it was going to require was an incremental improvement to Vlad's launch angle for a lot of the harder hit balls to start clearing the fence.

Vlad mashed the s*** out of the baseball for the month of May last season. Literally the only issue was the low overall launch angle of only 3 degrees. BA/xBA .366/.352 SLG/xSLG .475/.542 wOBA/xwOBA .409/.426 This came along with an average exit velocity of 95.1 MPH and hard hit rate of 64.7%. The results suggest Vlad was actually a tad unlucky with the batted ball results, there was literally nothing fluky or lucky about the month he produced. The month end result of 168 wRC+ could have been something approaching 175-180 wRC+ with a tad better luck on batted balls, and that's nothing to sneeze at.

I'll leave this up to you to explain why you think this was offered too soon. Every single piece of analysis I've seen online suggests this is a team friendly deal, with potential to become even more team friendly over time. Kirk is a core member of the team, and the club has nothing coming in the pipeline to replace him in the next few years. Kirk has been MLB's 6th most valuable catcher by FWAR since becoming a full time regular in 2022, and he offers a solid floor and a very high ceiling with room for potential improvement in the future. I find it interesting you are trying to claim my views are ridiculous when you have been constantly whining about how the team doesn't want to pony up $500 million to a defensively challenged/awful baserunning/inconsistent 1B/DH type with a chronic wrist issue and long term body concerns, and then you immediately start complaining that the team offered up a shade over 10% of that total to lock up their catcher. In the 3 seasons since Kirk became a full time regular he has provided 9.4 FWAR for the Blue Jays vs 10.0 for Vlad. But of course you are going to complain that Kirk agreed to a team friendly extension while complaining that the team should just capitulate to Vlad and hand him a well above market value extension because you are the type to complain about every single move the team makes because "Shatkins" can do no right in your view.